Fascinated by what drives start ups to succeed, I look at the entire process from inception to fundraising and everything in between. I was previously an editor at Global Security Finance, a London-based newsletter covering security and defense for the finance community which meant uncovering start ups with exciting technologies as well as interviewing VCs, government officials and defense giants on their financing, funding and M&A strategy. As a Columbia Journalism School student I delved into an eclectic mix of city politics, struggling Harlem businesses and the interactive theatre scene. Although I’m British, a childhood spent in Malaysia has meant a lifelong addiction to Asian food. I continue to hunt down the perfect bowl of noodles in NYC, Sriracha sauce bottle in hand.

When Amitav Chakravartty was charged with finding somewhere for his extended family to stay for a graduation in Southern California, he turned to Craigslist.

Everything seemed legit, so he wired the owner $900 and thought no more about it. It was only when he and his family turned up late at night after a long drive that they learned with horror that the house he thought they were staying in was actually owned by a congressman and they’d been scammed.

Feeling sheepish Chakravartty didn’t tell anyone about the experience. That was until he was having lunch at his favorite local Jamaican place with workmate Anirban Bardalaye. Bardalaye started talking about trying to book a vacation rental for his wife and five year old son. “It’s insane,” Bardalaye said. “It’s taken me two weeks of emails, faxes and phone calls.”

“You think that’s bad,” said Chakravartty and told him about the congressman scam fiasco. “I’ve been researching everything on it for six months; I’ve got a spreadsheet of everyone in market.”

“Dude, we need to do something about this,” said Bardalaye. It’s from these ‘considerable pain points’ that the duo drew up plans for Zaranga, a vacation rental website with a difference – they would only list professionally managed vacation rentals. They’ve both built software for startups and enterprise companies but this was the first time either had been in charge of a consumer product.

Starting off as a weekend and evenings project, Bardalaye and Chakravartty quit their jobs as Chief Architect and Director of Product Management at Serena Software on the same day when they heard they’d been accepted to seed accelerator Y Combinator.

In closed beta since April 2012, Zaranga launched officially in February 2013. They had a strong first year doing $1 million sales on 5,000 stays. Bardalaye says they’re been increasing their inventory by 70% per month, edging close to profitability and are currently in the midst of raising venture capital to expand.

English: Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Focused at first on California’s vacation hotspots like Lake Tahoe and Napa, Zaranga is now expanding nationwide. It’s a vast market with lots of room to play. U.S. travelers spent $23 billion on vacation rentals in 2012, with online bookings leaping to 24% and growing. It can also be extremely lucrative – as FORBES noted last week, Airbnb cofounders are now billionaires. But Bardalaye is keen to express that Airbnb is not a competitor. “Airbnb works best if you’re one person looking for a bed in a city or urban area,” he says. That might not be for long though.

“We want to maintain a certain level of standard with the houses that are listed on Zaranga. That’s what makes them ‘high-quality’ and ‘predictable’,” says Bardalaye. “Today, we get them only with vacation rentals that are managed professionally. In the future, we would be open to other vacation rentals as long as they adhere to our standards.”

Zaranga’s instantaneously booking system is also far more convenient that Airbnb, which doesn’t tell you for a day whether the booking has been accepted, making it harder to book on the fly if you’re travelling around.

Zaranga’s closest competitor is HomeAwayHomeAway, but they’ve worked in some key differences – Zaranga is the payment intermediary for booking payments and security deposits and so can protect travelers from scams.

“We have a 100% scam free record, while scams are quite common on HomeAway or VRBO,” says Bardalaye. Zaranga is more like Uber and HomeAway like YelpYelp, he says.

Amitav Chakravartty and Anirban Bardalaye, cofounders of Zaranga.

They also make sure all the information – calendars, rates and so on are always up-to-date so listings can be booked instantly and verify each listing. They have a booking concierge service, which mediates the discussion should a disagreement break out over something like cleaning fees after the vacation. “HomeAway does not have anything here as their responsibility ends when they connect a traveler to a supplier,” says Bardalaye. They also monitor vendors and drop them if they fall below a certain standard.

They’re also working on making it easier to split payments between a big group, always a headache if you go away with friends or for a bachelorette party. “At the moment we allow people to split payments over the phone and we allow people to share shortlists of rentals with friends,” says Bardalaye.

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To say that scams are quite common on HomeAway & VRBO is flat out false. Craigslist, YES. But tell me why a scammer would pay $400 for a listing that would get taken down very quickly? Sorry, but false claims like that make me question everything else they say too.

Yes, some scams…out of 1,000,000 listings. Surely as a journalist you know the concept of proportion. It is a false claim unless you have data to reflect the number of scams relative to the 1,000,000 listings to indicate that it is ‘common’?